The Search for Kä (5 page)

That kid's moods are as reliable as venetian blinds
, I thought.
Snap
—
light. Snap again
—
dark. Smile at her, snarl at me.

Just a minute, though,
I reminded myself.
Wasn't I treated to an elegant bow of respect just a moment ago? But that wasn't the “Captain”
—
oh, no. That was the Rider of the mate of the one and only female sha'um ever to leave the Valley, with Tarani, who can do no wrong!

I realized I was working myself into a four-star snit, and I stopped and took three deep breaths. The breathing helped. What didn't help was that Tarani and Thymas were still hands-on, eye to eye and nobody had noticed my extraordinary display of self-control.

What the hell's the matter with me? I
wondered.
Isn't this what we wanted
—
for Tarani and Yayshah to be greeted and accepted as part of the Sharith?

That's what I wanted from Dharak and the rest of the Sharith
, I reminded myself.
But Thymas is different. There's a lot of emotional history tied up with Thymas. His relationship with Tarani has to be part of it, but there's more to it, I know. Maybe the rest of the Sharith didn't really count. Maybe what I wanted was for
Thymas
to accept Tarani because I am “his” Captain.

I closed my eyes against the scene of closeness between Thymas and Tarani.

You idiot!
I scolded myself.
You're going to make a real mess of things if you don't sort Tarani from Thymas
—
her love from his respect, his feelings for Tarani from his feelings for you, and your reaction to both.

While you're at it, work on recognizing the Rikardon
/
Tarani team as something different from the Keeshah
/
Yayshah bonding. Because of the nature of the link between man
—
check that
—
Gandalaran and sha'um, the feelings of the four of us for one another are all intertwined. It would be easy, but dangerous as hell, to assume the Gandalaran emotional link is exactly parallel to the one between the sha'um. Yayshah and Keeshah are committed to one another in a natural, instinctual way. You and Tarani have chosen one another
—
“destiny” notwithstanding. As far as I can tell, “destiny” has brought us together to fight together
—
loving one another was our own idea.

Thymas turned to me again, his manner icily formal. “I will ride quickly back to Thagorn, tell Dharak about Yayshah, and relay your request. Please follow at your convenience.”

“If Dharak denies our request?” I asked.

“I doubt,” Thymas said, with a trace of sarcasm, “that he would send
me
to you with such a message.”

“Dharak will not refuse us,” Tarani said.

Thymas smiled at her. “No, he will not refuse you—at least,” he added, with a sardonic nod to me, “it is my opinion that when you reach Thagorn, the Lieutenant himself will honor and welcome you—” There was just enough pause to be noticeable. “—both of you. Tarani. Captain.”

Ronar, complying with the boy's mental request, moved closer to Thymas and crouched. His eyes never left Keeshah, and I could still feel my sha'um's wariness toward the other cat. Thymas mounted Ronar, who surged to his feet, whirled, and headed south through the broken brush that marked their entrance. They stopped long enough to allow Thymas to retrieve his hat from the stubborn branch and wave it at us in farewell.

Tarani was smiling in the direction Thymas and Ronar had gone. “Being a friend to Thymas can be very trying,” she said. “But rewarding. There can be no one else as full of contradiction and surprise as he is; his company is never dull.”

She had been stroking Yayshah absentmindedly. The cat became restless and stepped away. In following the sha'um's movement, Tarani caught sight of the look on my face, and laughed.

“Rikardon, why do you refuse to give me credit for objective perception of other people? It surprised you that I recognized Zefra's madness and it seems obvious that you expected me to accept Thymas's swiftly changing moods without irritation.”

“I guess I tend to put other people—and their feelings—into categories,” I said. “Thymas—well, my feelings about Thymas are pretty complicated.”

“And you believe mine are not?” she asked.

“I believe you love him,” I said. “A lot can be forgiven if you love someone.”

“Forgiven, yes,” Tarani agreed, coming toward me. “But not necessarily ignored.”

She put her hands on my shoulders, and her face grew serious. “We were discussing this before Thymas came, I believe?”

“We were,” I agreed. “I didn't have an answer for your question then, but I do now. Thymas will never be part of my ‘past,' Tarani—or yours. He is part of us as we are now. I know that you still love him.” She tensed, but I stopped her intended interruption by pulling her against me. “I also know that what you feel for him is different, less … special than what we share. I say I ‘know' that—my mind believes it, but my feelings don't learn as fast.”

She pressed against me, her arms around my neck, and we stood there for a moment. I was nearly overwhelmed with the knowledge of the value of what I held, the loss I would feel if she were never to touch me this way again. She seemed to be in the same sort of mood, for when she finally pushed at me gently, signaling me to let her stand back, I could feel a trembling in her arms.

“It moves me to hear you speak directly and honestly of what you feel,” she said. “It seems, at such times, that I can truly touch you, that a barrier I sometimes sense between us is missing. Now, while you are open to me, listen with your ‘feelings,' Rikardon. The kind of future a man and a woman might expect, a home and children and just being together, cannot be ours until we have settled the matter of the Ra'ira. Indeed, for that reason, we may never see such a future. But remember that, even while we are busy with what we must do, even while other people and other things capture our attention and our time, the very center of me is unfailingly and lovingly bound to the very center of you. We are linked, as surely as you and Keeshah, or Yayshah and I—with the difference you defined a few days ago. You and I cannot communicate these feelings directly; we must depend on words, and words can lead to misunderstanding.” She smiled.

She's remembering one of the many times in recent history that I opened my mouth and started chewing on my foot,
I thought.
I wish I could forget a few of those.

“I ask you, Rikardon, to speak to me as clearly as you can, and I promise the same to you.”

“It's a deal,” I said, moving the words around the lump in my throat. “And for starters, how about this? Speaking for Markasset and myself, we have known and loved many women, in this life and … and in my other life.”

Hypocrite!
I accused myself.
I'm still covering up the truth. Is this speaking “clearly?”

I pushed the guilty voice aside, answering:
Yes, it is the clear truth as far as my feelings are concerned, and they are most important right now.

“Tarani, we—I—have never known anyone, man or woman, whom I admire, respect, and cherish more than you.”

She gasped, and I felt her shiver. “You have a gift for language, Rikardon, and you have seen that your words have power over me. What you have just said will always be my favorite truth, for it speaks what I feel for you, as well.”

I held her again for a brief and tender moment.

“As you pointed out,” I said, “we must tend to other tasks—like introducing Yayshah to the Sharith and her new home.”

*Good
,* Keeshah grunted, as he stepped out onto the wide, brush-free caravan road.
*Easier.*

I echoed his sentiment. It had been bad enough breaking our own trail across the rocky slopes of the Morkadahl foothills, where brush and boulders presented equal obstacles. For the last half-mile or so, we had been moving further downslope, looking for the road we had just found. Without the occasional bare rock to keep the ground clear of ground cover, we had been breaking trail literally, crashing through tangles of brush and forcing our way past natural walls of vines, interlaced among the twists of curly trunked, wild dakathrenil trees.

We might have chosen merely to cross the higher slopes and enter Thagorn from the side, but nobody suggested it. The valley held rich, well-watered soil, and beyond the cultivated areas—meaning the higher slopes—the wild growth made the stuff we were moving through look like the Kapiral Desert. Tarani had made that trip once, on foot, and still carried faint scars on her hands to testify to the struggle it had been. For the sha'um, with their greater bulk, basic four-point balance and less efficient grasping capability, going that way would have been unrelenting misery.

Besides, we had made a point of requesting permission to enter Thagorn's valley, and that meant, by every tradition Ricardo or Markasset recognized, going in by the front door—in this case, the front
gate.
The caravan road came west, more or less, from the Refreshment House at Relenor and led south, more or less, right in front of Thagorn. From there it followed the Morkadahls around the southern tip of the range and headed north to Omergol, a crossroads city noted for the richly veined green marble its natives mined from the hillsides.

Many of the Gandalaran cities I had seen were surrounded by walls, but there was no other wall like Thagorn's. It was more like a dam than a wall, its upper edge stretching level across the narrow opening into a fertile, steep-sided valley. Its lower edge followed the shallow-dish contour of the ground. At the center of its hundred-foot span, the wall stood some thirty feet high, and a double gate filled half that height. The doors of the gate were made of thick layers of laminated wood and braced with bronze fittings, and they were usually closed.

As the sha'um topped the ridge that marked the edge of Thagorn's valley, I could tell that the gate stood wide open—not because I could see the doors, but because I could see the people who formed a double line along the road and through the entrance to Thagorn's protected valley. The Sharith formed the edges of those lines, but behind them thronged the women, children, and “cubs”—boys thirteen to sixteen who had sha'um and were in training as Riders.

The line of people ended halfway between us and the gate, and at its opening, waiting to greet us, stood Dharak and Thymas, the boy a step or two behind his father. There had been the murmuring sound common to a crowd of people waiting for something. The hillside had blocked it from us, but we heard it—for the merest instant—as we came over the top. A frantic whispering sound reached us as all eyes turned in our direction—down from the throngs on the wall, up from the waiting people. There was a long moment of total silence, then a roar of noise rose from the throats of the Sharith.

Yayshah flinched back at the sound, ears flattening and neckfur lifting. Tarani was startled, too, and I recalled that she had not been present at my “installation” as Captain, when I had been honored in this way.

They were shouting my name. It had moved me then, and it touched me now. Equal parts of pride and humility straightened my shoulders as I pulled myself into a sitting position and urged Keeshah downslope at a slow and steady pace.

I realized that Yayshah and Tarani weren't with me, and I directed Keeshah to slow even further, to give them a chance to catch up with us. When they didn't come up alongside immediately, I became alarmed and glanced quickly back.

I've been thinking about Yayshah being accepted by the Sharith
, I realized.
It never occurred to me to wonder whether it would work the other way around.

My fears had been groundless, though; Yayshah was following with no more display of unrest than an occasional twitch of her ears. Her bulk added to the already impressive stateliness of a sha'um's gait. I felt, as I looked at her, the reverence common to men of Gandalara and of Ricardo's world, a sense of the mystery of maternity. Added to it was a purely Gandalaran awareness, awe of the cat and of what it meant to see her here, outside the Valley of the Sha'um.

I made a very slight hand signal to invite Tarani to ride beside me, but she shook her head and kept Yayshah a couple of yards behind Keeshah. We were nearing Dharak and Thymas, so I didn't have time to argue with her, but I felt disquieted as I turned to face the Sharith.

The third repetition of “Rikardon and Keeshah!” faded just as I stopped some five yards from the end of the reception line. Dharak took a step toward me, and it was only then that I realized there were no sha'um visible, except for Keeshah and Yayshah. I slid off Keeshah's back to meet the Lieutenant on foot. It didn't matter much—mounted or walking, a man
with
a sha'um had an emotional and physical advantage over a man
without
one—but it made me more comfortable to be eye-to-eye with the straight-backed old man.

“Welcome back, Captain,” Dharak said, fairly glowing with pleasure and extending his hand in front of him. I shook it, touched by the sincerity of his welcome and his adoption of my greeting gesture over his own.

“You look well, Lieutenant. I'm glad to see your arm has healed.”

He flexed his left elbow. “Shola has great skill at setting broken bones,” he said, and laughed. “It comes from much practice.”

He looked me up and down.

“Shola will be glad to ply her kitchen skills on you, my friend; you look in need of a good meal.”

“I wouldn't mind several,” I said, pulling at the shoulder of my ruined tunic, “
after
I've had several baths.” Shola was, most certainly, in the crowd around us, but Dharak's speaking of her as if she were absent reminded me that, for the moment, the Lieutenant and the Captain were engaged in a formal ceremony of greeting. “But I am not alone, Dharak, and I may enjoy your hospitality only if it is also open to all those in my company.”